Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  How would Betta live with Hár’s wife in our house? How could she go on while he held someone else right before her? How could he even do it, for that matter? Betta would need unnatural, impossible courage to watch while he walked out with his wife at night, bedded her there in the pantry, had babies upon babies. My mind raced with the horror of it. The litany of questions that applied the same to me. How would I live with my own husband?

  I could never really agree to marry Brosa. When the shock passed, I would really talk with him. I would hurt him, soon. His natural smile would fade because of me.

  Men—the whole idea of them—sat like a bundled ache in my stomach. I glanced at Betta and considered whether we could fall in love without them. But no, I loved her, but I didn’t feel that way. I felt something so utterly different. I felt lust for, I had to admit, two brothers. Love for one.

  “I knew this would come,” she said to the sky. “I already stopped seeing the fool.” She sat up tall, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and blinked hard, as if to cleanse herself of sadness. But her voice was a hoarse whisper. “I just … wanted him.”

  The way she caressed the words, it was like she was touching Hár’s face right now. I could see right into her, feel what it was like when she watched him move and smile. Someday she might have marveled at his features while he slept, perhaps seen them echoed in the face of her child.

  Her heart had crashed ahead without knowing how difficult this would be. She couldn’t have imagined it. I snuggled against her side, as if we rocked in the same leaky boat.

  It was afternoon when Hár cut his finger off.

  Betta and I came out of the woods and brush, full baskets in our hands and determination in her eyes. She’d made peace with needing to face him, and once she’d made up her mind, her courage couldn’t wait. She was that little girl sometimes, the one who wanted a simple, happy life. She needed to see Hár’s face to know it was true, that her hopes were over. It broke my heart to watch her tripping down the big slope toward the beach, baskets and braids swaying, me right behind.

  About a third of the way down, we heard a furious bellow followed by a series of poetic Viking curses about goats’ balls and troll piss, loud enough to carry a half mile. Betta dropped her baskets and ran like a scared little kid. I dropped mine too, and matched her.

  If I focused on the driftwood, I didn’t need to watch Hár’s hand bleed, didn’t have to see his finger lying in the sand. The wood looked pretty, snowy gray dripping with ruby and cherry and amber. Blood soaked his clothes, and his ax lay slick and red at his feet. We arrived just in time to see him kick it viciously out of his way, calling it something I could only translate as incompetent cock sucker. He stomped to the nearby fire, where men had been hammering and sharpening their blades for the past four days.

  He sat on a log, as if to warm himself and contemplate the stupidity of his accident. He opened his palm and considered his left hand, now missing half its first finger. Magnus came breathlessly with a soaked cloth. Hár wrapped it—not around his wound, but around his remaining fingers, wincing only slightly though it was streaming with salt water. He curved his fingers into a fist, and without hesitation he thrust his hand into the fire.

  Betta turned white as snow and sank to her knees. She rocked back onto her heels, then up again on her knees, her hands like claws in the folds of her skirt, wanting to run to him. But she stayed away. She had such an iron will.

  A dozen people had gathered. Thora fussed at her father’s side, and Magnus knelt to ask if Hár needed anything. Hár answered with a roar at both of them. “Get off me!” He grumbled more curses, looked around and barked “Let Betta come.”

  The beach became quiet. Even the relentless rhythm of the waves seemed to pause to be sure he’d said “Betta.” Betta stood with great poise and without looking at anyone else, she approached him. Thora stared open-mouthed at her Da, as he melted from angry old man to tender lover at the sight. Betta knelt beside him, and took his forearm to look at his wound, but he pulled his hand away.

  “My hand is no matter, Woman. I need to talk.”

  If it was possible, even more of the blood left her face, and she was a ghost, ready to dissipate. But she placed her hands steadily on her own knees and waited.

  “You’ve heard I will marry.”

  She nodded, holding back all emotion, more controlled than I could ever be. I thought of myself just yesterday, accusing and pleading. The things I’d said to Heirik. Don’t give me away like a sack of grain.

  “I meant to talk to you before there was word,” Hár told her, and his voice was gentle. Betta dropped her head, then, no longer able to bear what he was saying—giving her this speech, and in front of half the family. Her will failed, and her features crumpled with pain.

  Hár was still talking, “And before this happened.” He gestured at the inconvenience of his severed finger.

  Then he saw her face and quickly took her by the chin with his good hand. “Nei, nei, mo chuisle, shhh.” She had taught him the Gaelic words, and his voice was like I’d never imagined it could be, caressing the words, caressing Betta with them. “What are you about?” He shook his head, as if bewildered by the emotions of women. “I only wanted to know, first. If you would say yes.”

  Her angled brows drew together, and I watched as his words very slowly made sense to her, and then her eyes widened and she just said, “Oh.”

  They smiled just for each other, as if none of us were there. He cupped more of her face, covering her cheek, his fingers tracing her hairline where her tight braids began, and she tilted her head and leaned into his touch. Her hand came up to cover his, and her eyes slid shut in bliss and relief. Tears traveled down her pink cheeks.

  “Well, hjarta mitt?” He added ruefully, “Are you through with me now that I have but one good hand?”

  She burst out laughing, and so did all of us. And she told him she wanted to marry him.

  He nodded then, that taken care of, and told her he’d need some new clothes and asked if she’d go find them.

  They didn’t kiss, didn’t hold one another. Betta gazed up at him a bit longer, though, and it was stunning how they transformed each other. She was a gorgeous woman. And for a moment, Hár wasn’t a gruff and dangerous Viking. He was a lover, a husband of the heart.

  On my muddled trip home, everyone else ranged intensely high, full of joy and whale and weddings. I heard music, but it came from far behind my back and belonged to another world, a small and colorful one. Here where I rode out in front, everything was washed out, colors indistinct, clouds unmoving in a plain sky. The luminous and ever-rushing river we followed through the valley, now slogged along through new grasses and shifting mud. We walked its banks, against its course.

  I pushed on up front with my betrothed, still stunned at the word. Floored by the whole experience of meeting Brosa, let alone marrying him. Whenever he shifted to walk close to me, I tensed—Drifa snorting in response and tossing her head. Didn’t he see what his brother meant to me? Why did he persist with this?

  Brosa tried to cheer me. He talked to me in bright and easy tones, but his voice was just a bit too smooth and light, the differences always coming to mind.

  Mostly, I heard Svana’s teeny yips up ahead. “Herra!” She called after Heirik and spurred her horse up behind Vakr. What could that vapid girl have to say to him?

  I would not tag along after them to find out.

  I’d passed hands between brothers like an ax or horse.

  Back at the house, I stood at the center of a storm of horses and whale meat and fat and bones. Provisions and shouts carried past in all directions. Home now, things that happened at the sea would become real, become everyday.

  In the midst of the flurry, Svana stood beside Heirik. “Let me help you,” she said, and she tied the laces on his bracers. A simple gesture, at the end of a long day. Time seemed to slow down for me, every second a lifetime. I watched her hands shake as she touched him. Hear
d him say “Já,” distracted, staring into the homefield, maybe thinking of seeds and light. Not desiring her touch, but a yes nonetheless.

  Beyond them, the house seemed to change before my eyes, from a protective and playful creature to a closed, frigid lump. The grass shriveled and turned to gray fingers and then to solid ice. A trick of the light.

  When Svana was through, Heirik looked down at his hand, flexed his fingers and shook out his wrist. What did he see when he looked down at the top of her blond head? Or into her upturned spring-sky eyes?

  I watched his future start, without me.

  We didn’t see the chief again for fifteen days.

  Brosa seemed to know this would happen, he fell so easily into his brother’s absence. It gave us time to know each other, he told me, as if it had been arranged. And over many days, I did settle into this quiet time, too, and into Brosa. I learned to like him very much.

  Brosa didn’t seem to believe me when I told him we couldn’t marry, could never happen. He charmingly wooed me, shooting arrows with me in the yard and walking to the stable to talk privately with the horses. He sat with me by the fire, moving closer until our bodies rested against one another and I felt heady with his presence.

  As the mornings and evenings passed, I felt Heirik’s absence less, felt almost disconnected from the thread of him. A sensation of freedom and sickness in my heart. When I recalled Svana touching Heirik casually, speaking gently to him, it felt like those things happened in another lifetime. Here, now, Svana’s gaze would rest on me and Brosa, and her little teeth had never looked whiter.

  Brosa came to me again and again like a puppy, until finally, sometimes, I played. Tonight, I agreed to walk out with him, and he’d led me halfway around the field where barley was beginning to grow. He pushed me gently back into the homefield wall, deep in this unfathomably soft spring evening.

  The loam smelled damp and clean, and he cradled my face in his palm. My cheek fit into the cup of his big hand. He bent to kiss me. Undeniably delicious, his lips carried traces of after-dinner honey. His beard scratched my chin. He pressed into me now, pinned me to the wall. The pressure and weight of his body, the heaviness between his legs, carried me off. I closed my eyes.

  My hands went to his hips and I found his curves so familiar. I swept his broad back with my fingers, the nape of his neck. His hair felt just like Heirik’s. With one hand, I gathered it roughly in a ponytail and held it that way, and when he uttered a soft sound of desire the image was complete. For a glorious moment, it was Heirik who had me against that wall, ready to love me well, until I forgot my name.

  He bent farther to kiss my collarbone, the sensitive skin above the neckline of my dress. I whimpered without thought, and it made him harder. Instinctively, I rolled my hips. They weren’t a perfect god-made match, but in fairness we were standing, slipping then, melting into a grassy wall. Sliding down to the ground, my cheek against the grass, hands caught up in his hair. I was on my back, then, Brosa a gorgeous weight on top of me.

  Nei, I would not.

  “Stop,” I told him, and this time I meant it. I pushed him away, and he drew back to search my face.

  He must have seen my conviction, because he nodded and rolled off of me. He laid on his back, staring at the sky and panting like a house dog. I struggled with my skirts and sat up, my back against the homefield wall, and we both breathed and calmed ourselves. We stayed there together, slowly returning to the world—to the grass and earth and moonlight surrounding us with silver. The complaint of a goat.

  It was hard to imagine a less sensual sound, and we both laughed, broken free from the trance of sex.

  I sat against the wall, Brosa’s head in my lap, and I stroked the hair off his forehead. It looked like gold, unstoppably sun-drenched even in the dark. His weight was simple and intimate, and holding him this way was more familiar than I expected. It was effortless, his eyes watching the sky. I traced his cheekbone with my thumb.

  We didn’t talk. Mainly he looked at the stars, and I looked at the field around us, the immediate grass, the darkness beyond. I indirectly looked at him, and he was breathtaking, his eyes upturned to the sky. He seemed not to notice me, not even notice my fingers in his loose hair. I didn’t know what he might be seeing.

  “Esa had already died when I named my son.”

  He said it as though he’d picked this statement casually, like a wildflower. But his voice was smaller than I’d ever heard it. Smaller than seemed possible for such a bear of a man.

  He reached up to his forehead as if to stop my hand, then just held onto me there, both of our hands against his cheek. He looked into the sky, not at me, and he was so young, so lost and scared. He was back in the moment, stunned by quick grief and confusion. He told me how he’d gone to his knees beside Esa, holding her hand. Hildur had been there, had dragged him up off his knees and told him to sit on the bench.

  “She told me to hurry and take him in my lap, that he would not last.” Brosa absently made the sign of Thor’s hammer on my hand, the same way he had blessed his child. “I wanted him to die as part of the family.”

  A sighing of grass in a small breeze drew my attention to the fields, the valley I knew was out there in the dark. A quiet moment passed.

  “I named him Arulf,” Brosa continued. I had heard this whole story from the little birds while spinning, but I knew Brosa now. Now I could imagine him in his moments of loss. He’d held the child, and named him for his own father, Ulf. “Arulf Brosuson.”

  Hearing the child’s full name was a sharp stab. I opened my palm against Brosa’s head, pressed and held him there.

  “A good name,” I told him through my tears.

  The wall at my back sheltered us. Brosa smiled then, and turned his head to burrow into me, into the warmth of my lap. He crossed his arms on his chest and closed his eyes, lashes against my red wool dress. We could sleep here, I thought, just stay still and he could breathe deeper and slower until the waking world passed, and I could follow him and sleep, too.

  “I can never replace them,” I whispered into the air, my fingers finding his curls, soft like those of a little boy.

  “Já, I know.” He spoke into my dress. Resigned, but hopeful too, in the admitting of it.

  I told Brosa, “You can’t replace him, either.” And it was good to hear it out loud between us. “It’s okay. You’re beautiful for trying.”

  He smiled, comfortable against me, his eyes still closed.

  “What has my brother done, then?” He asked me, with a wicked smile. “Enchanted you?”

  I laughed out loud, a scattering of sound. The thought of Heirik bewitching me was somehow funny.

  Then I thought of the ravine and what had happened there the first time Heirik and I were ever alone together. He’d walked toward me with such intensity, and I’d backed away in fear, yet by the time we climbed the hill back home, I was lost in love. Even without my knowing it. I thought of how he’d taken me to the woods and I’d been thoroughly seduced. Not far from here, he had first called me Litla. I suddenly felt my love for Heirik as if it were a live thing. An animal, not far away, watching me and what I’d just done with Brosa.

  I breathed deeply of the green and brown smells of night, and I had no answer. I leaned back into the stout wall, and Brosa snuggled into my lap, and we did fall asleep, for a while.

  Little bits of sticks and grass stuck everywhere in our clothes and hair. We stood outside the door of the house and I dusted off Brosa’s shoulders. I ran my fingers through his beard and the hair that fell around his face. He inhaled deeply and held his breath for a moment.

  “Careful, Woman.” He stopped my hand and held it to his cheek. “You’ll find yourself up against a wall again.” He grinned and picked a twig from my hair.

  He confused my heart, messed it all up. Admitting he didn’t love me, knowing I would never replace his wife, but still insisting on marrying me. And playfully offering to take me like animals against this grassy hou
se.

  “You and I are over,” I told him with a smile, a kind but insistent hand against his chest, pushing him away.

  “Turn around,” he told me. “Put your hands on the house.”

  The sod was cool and yielding under my hands. He brushed me down, starting at the nape of my neck. He stopped along the way to pick out debris. The scratchy wool dress attracted every kind of grass, twig or bit of dirt. When he reached the curve of my buttocks, he brushed a little slower, easier, cupping me in one hand, and I swore I wouldn’t let anything start again.

  Then he smacked me good and declared me fit to go inside. I turned, put my hands against his chest to laughingly push him away, and he grabbed the back of my head. He kissed my forehead. Sweet and familiar, like an old married couple, I thought, and then shivered.

  “It’s a little cold, já?” A word for triflingly chilly, nothing at all to speak of. I felt it come from deep in his chest, where my palm rested. “We can go in.”

  “Just a second.” I wanted to count every star, say goodnight to every one, before going back inside to smoke and body odor and my sad little bed where I dreamt of other, different futures.

  The air moved, clear and delicious around us. I looked back at the sweep of the spring night sky, and there came three girls out of the dark, as though they’d sprung like land spirits from the cool valley. Dalla, Thora, Svana having a walk before bedtime. I wasn’t sure how much they’d seen of our affectionate grooming, but they surely found Brosa and me in an embrace. I felt caught, guilty for enjoying him. It wasn’t right to enjoy him.

  He let me go so he could hold the door with exaggerated gallantry, winking at Dalla. Hár’s daughters smiled sweetly as they went by. When Svana passed into the house, though, her eyes burned inside a cold and lovely face.

  Lotta turned four years old.

  On her day, she sat cross-legged in the grass, and we did her hair in spirals and a flower crown. She bent over obediently, staring into the heart of a plucked flower the color of an egg yoke. Lotta offered her ash blond hair to Betta to comb, and it fell all around, slippery straight, so silky, it kept escaping from Betta’s fingers. And Betta, whose bony hands were always competent and sure, kept dropping and losing the strands. She swore under her breath. A bitter, perfect compound phrase somewhat like shaggy-headed skirt chaser. She sounded a lot like Hár, and I smiled but hid it from her.